THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE.
With the death of Tamerlane all his further designs were lost; his
armies were disbanded; China was saved; and fourteen years after
his decease, the most powerful of his children sent an embassy of
friendship and commerce to the court of Pekin. But far different was
the fate of the Ottoman monarchy. The massive trunk was bent to the
ground, but no sooner had the hurricane passed than it again rose
with fresh vigor and more luxuriant foliage.
The province of Anatolia was desolated; the cities without walls
or palaces, without treasures or rulers: while the open country was
overspread with hordes of shepherds of Tartar or Turcoman origin. The
five living sons of Bajazet were soon fighting for the spoils of their
father's empire: finally the favorite son Mohammed I., stood forth
as the sole heir of the empire. He obtained Anatolia by treaty and
Roumania by force of arms and the eight years of his peaceful reign
were spent in banishing the vices of civil discord and placing on a
firmer basis the fabric of the Ottoman monarchy. The wisest Turks were
devoted to the unifying of the empire and from Anatolia to Roumania
one spirit seemed to animate them all. The Christian powers of Europe
might have emulated their example, but the bitter schism between
the Greek and the Latin divisions of the church, the factions and
the wars of France and England, blinded them to the danger that was
threatening in the East.
Had a confederate fleet occupied the straits of the Dardanelles and a
strong fort been built on the west side at Gallipoli, the Ottoman power
must speedily have been annihilated; but as it was the dissensions and
the indifference of the other powers of Europe first yielded up the
Greek Empire to the Turks as they have since sustained it--an alien
power--race and religion in one of the fairest regions of the earth.
In sheerest folly did Manuel the Emperor of Constantinople enter
into an alliance with Mohammed I., whereas his policy should have
been to prolong the division of the Ottoman powers. The Sultan and
his troops were transported over the Bosphorus, and were hospitably
entertained in the capital. Not long after he unsheathed a sword
of revenge in delivering the true or the false Mustapha, real or
pretended son of Bajazet I., on his promise of delivering up the
keys of Gallipoli, or rather of Europe, so soon as he was placed
on the throne of Roumania. But no sooner was he established than he
dismissed the Greek ambassadors with a smile of contempt, saying in
a pious tone that at the day of judgment he would rather answer for
the violation of an oath than for having delivered up a Mussulman
city into the hands of an infidel.
The Emperor was thus at once the hated of the two rivals for the
Ottoman throne; and the victory of Amurath over Mustapha was followed
by the siege of Constantinople, the following spring (A. D. 1422,
June 10, Aug. 24). The strength of the walls successfully resisted
an army of two hundred thousand Turks for some two months, when the
army was drawn off to quell some domestic revolt, and the fall of the
city was delayed for thirty years under the disgraceful conditions
of the payment of tribute to Turkey.
Meantime the Ottomans were with cruel severity, organizing a terrible
power for further conquest. The captured provinces of Thrace,
Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Servia, became the perpetual
recruiting ground for the Turkish army. After the royal fifth of
the captives was diminished by conquest, an inhuman tax of the fifth
child or of every fifth year was rigorously levied on the Christian
families. At the age of twelve or fourteen, the most robust youths were
torn away from their parents to be trained for the army or for civil
service. They might pass through four successive schools according
to their development or promise and then found themselves without
friendships, outside their own number, without parents, without homes,
dependent on the will of the despot on the throne, whose hand, on the
slightest displeasure could break in pieces "these statues of glass."
Thus with satanic craftiness and cruelty were the stolen children
of Christian races trained to become the destroyers of a Christian
empire, which, for more than a thousand years had stayed the flood
of barbarism from sweeping over all Europe.
Freeman, the historian, declares that we may take Mohammed II.,
as the ideal of his race, the embodiment in their fullest form of
Ottoman greatness and Ottoman wickedness. A general and a statesman
of the highest order, he was also a man of intellectual cultivation
in other ways, a master of many languages and a patron of the art
and the literature of his time. At the same time the three abiding
Ottoman vices, cruelty, lust and faithlessness, stand forth in terrible
preëminence. His first act was the murder of his infant brother and
he made the murder of brothers the standing law of his empire. He
made the Ottoman power what it has been ever since. He defined its
northern and western boundaries. "The Ottoman Empire as our age has to
deal with it, is before all things the work of Mohammed the Conqueror."
His reign was from 1451 to 1481. Coming to the throne at the early
age of twenty-one, he had read Plutarch assiduously and studied the
careers of Alexander, Cæsar and other great conquerors; causing also
the biographies of illustrious men to be translated into Turkish,
to give to himself and to his people the emulation of glory.
On returning to Adrianople, this thirst of glory and of conquest
devoured him as it had devoured his ancient models. He coveted
Constantinople with a consuming avidity that often woke him with
a bound from his sleep. The phantom of Constantinople beset by day
and night the young conqueror. He tried to conceal his impatience
for fear of exciting before the hour the emotions of the Christian
West. He could not restrain it. He sent for his grand vizier, Khalil,
at night. Alarmed, the vizier embraced as in a last farewell his wife
and daughter, made his death prayer and appeared before the Sultan. He
prostrated himself as if to redeem his life by a ransom and presented
to Mohammed II. the golden cup. "Do not fear, my lala, (familiar term
as father), do not fear, it is not thy gold nor thy life I want: what
I want that thou shouldest give me is Constantinople." Then showing
him his eyes, fatigued with sleeplessness, and his couch disordered,
he added, "I cannot sleep unless you promise me what I dream of night
and day."
"You must have it, my master," responded Khalil. "Who could refuse you
that which belonged to you by the grandeur of your views, and by the
omnipotence of your arms. I have divined this long time your desires
beneath your silence; I have all prepared to satisfy on an appointed
day, your religion, your patriotism, your glory. Constantinople or
my head is at your feet."
The next day the Sultan set out with Khalil for Gallipoli and then
proceeded to the village situated on the European shore of the
Bosphorus at the point which formerly gave passage to the Persians
of Darius. There he ordered Khalil to construct forthwith a fortress
in front of the Asiatic fortress constructed twenty years before by
his ancestor, Bajazet-Ilderim.
This promontory on the Bosphorus, at a point where the channel is not
wider than a river and only a few miles distant from Constantinople,
was admirably chosen to extend the limits of the conquest, to wall
in the city, and to smother it by terror even before being swept by
the fury of their fiery onslaught.
With fantastic superstition the Sultan or his architect gave the
different compartments the form of the letters, which in Arabic
compose both his name and the name of the false prophet, as if to
stamp with the very walls of a fortress on the soil of Europe, the
seal of Islamism, and the empire on the last promontory that still
sheltered the capital of the Christians.
The Greek Emperor alarmed at this menace almost under the very walls
of his capital sent Ambassadors who timidly demanded explanations
from the Sultan.
"Of what do you complain?" replied he, "I form no project against your
city. To provide for the security of my dominions is not to infringe
the treaties. Have you forgotten the extremity to which my father was
reduced when your Emperor, leagued against him with the Hungarians,
sought to hinder him from passing into Europe? His galleys at that
time barred the passage and Mourad was obliged to claim the aid
of the Genoese. * * * * My father at the battle of Varna vowed to
construct a fortress on the European shore. This vow I fulfil. Have
you the right or power to control in this manner what are mine;
that of Asia because it is inhabited by Ottomans; that of Europe,
because you are unable to defend it.
"Go tell your master that the reigning Sultan is not like his
predecessors: that their wishes did not go so far as does to-day
my power. I permit you to retire for this time: but I will have the
skin flayed off the bodies of those who henceforth should have the
insolence of calling me to an account for what I do in my own empire."
A thousand masons and a host of laborers were soon at work on this
fortress.
Some Greek peasants, at work in their harvest fields, having been
slain, Constantine, the Emperor, sent messengers to expostulate, and
then to add: "If unmerited reverses menace the capital of the empire,
the Omnipotent will be the refuge of the Emperor. The inhabitants
will defend themselves by all the means which destiny leaves them,
so long as God shall not have inspired the Sultan with thoughts of
justice and peace."
Mohammed II. replied to this adjuration of his justice, but by the
first cannon shot discharged from the fortress, already armed, at a
Venetian vessel wishing to try if the Bosphorus were still free.
While Mohammed thus threatened the capital of the East the Emperor
implored with fervent prayers the assistance of earth and heaven. The
invisible powers seemed deaf to his supplications; the Powers of Europe
were stupid, jealous or deaf. Christendom beheld with indifference
the fall of Constantinople. Some states were too weak and others too
remote. By some the danger was considered imaginary, by others as
inevitable. The western princes were involved in endless quarrels;
and the Roman Pontiff was exasperated by the falsehood or obstinacy
of the Greeks. Thus they were left to the tender mercies of the Turks.
The Sultan and Khalil had already returned to Adrianople to prepare
the two hundred thousand men, the machines, the arms and the munitions
stored in secret for the assault. From Germany and Italy were brought
all the arts and the latest secrets of scientific warfare. A cannon
founder, Urban, a Hungarian, deserted from Constantinople on pretext
of poor pay and sought the service of the Sultan.
Mohammed thought nothing dear in exchange for Constantinople: and
lavished gold and honors on the refugee. "Can you found me a piece
sufficiently like a thunderbolt that a ball launched from it may
shake the walls of Constantinople?"
"I can found you one," replied the Hungarian, "that would overthrow
the walls of Babylon."
A foundry was established at Adrianople, the metal was prepared, and
at the end of three months Urban produced a piece of brass ordnance of
stupendous and almost incredible magnitude. The stone bullet was of
twelve palms circumference and weighed twelve hundred pounds. Before
its trial the population were warned of the coming event. The explosion
was felt or heard in the circuit of an hundred furlongs, the ball
was driven above a mile and buried itself a fathom in the ground. It
required a force of a hundred oxen and seven hundred men to move it,
and nearly two months were consumed in dragging it one hundred and
fifty miles to Constantinople.
In the spring of 1453 two hundred thousand men from Asia, and two
hundred thousand from Europe assembled rapidly in the vast plains
that extend from Gallipoli to Constantinople under the eye of the
Sultan, Khalil and his generals. The land and the sea supplied them in
abundance for all the wants of the army; while a fleet of one hundred
and sixty vessels of war, many of them but small ones, cruised about
in full view of the tents upon the sea of Marmora.
Constantine, the Emperor, must have been mad to hope to defend a city
some thirteen miles in extent, when a careful enumeration showed only
four thousand nine hundred and seventy Romans: to which were added some
five or six thousand strangers under the command of John Justiniani,
a noble Genoese.
No capital had been more favored by nature than Constantinople
for defence against the investment and the assault of an entire
people. Geography had made it a citadel, a thousand years of power
in its emperors and of art in its engineers had completed the work
of nature. Nature had made a peninsula, policy an island, the hills
a fortress. The Greek Empire as if it had foreseen that one day it
would fall, seemed to have meant to confine all its monuments, all
its masterpieces, all its riches in an Acropolis at the extreme point
of the continent of Europe where it fled the barbarians to encounter
the Conquerors.
While fear was falling upon the hearts of Byzantines presentiments
of glory cheered the hearts of the soldiers of Mohammed through the
sole prophecy of the Koran. "Know you the city," says the Koran,
"of which two sides look upon the sea and one side upon the land? It
will fall, not beneath the force of the enginery of war, but before
the omnipotence of these words: 'There is no other God but God,
and God alone is great.'"
Nevertheless the strength of the continuous wall outside of Thrace,
flanked with towers and bristling with battlements, the great
thickness and the height of the walls, the site and depth of the
trenches, the cincture of the waves, the impregnable renown of
the city, the history of the numerous and fruitless sieges which
Constantinople had withstood did not leave Mohammed and his generals
at ease as to the result. Twenty-nine times since its foundation had
this mistress of the seas and of the continents seen an enemy under
its walls. Constantinople had triumphed in twenty-one. Then any day
the West might relieve the city through the two seas. Mohammed was
looking ceaselessly towards the sea dreading to see approach through
the Dardanelles a cloud of Christian sail bringing the courage and
skill of Europe to the battlefield of Christendom. Oh that the wasted
warriors of Jerusalem might spring to life again and save Europe
from the curse of Islam. But there was no voice, neither any that
regarded. Constantinople was left alone in her death agonies.
The Turkish vanguards soon swept away the towns and villages as far
as the gates of the city and Mohammed and his army halted at the
distance of five miles. Thence ordering the final disposition of his
vast army he marched in battle array, planted the imperial standard
before the gate of St. Romanus and on the 6th of April, 1453, formed
the memorable siege of Constantinople.
The colossal cannon of Adrianople and some others of very great size
were trained upon this single gate, while eighteen other batteries were
placed in a continuous line along the main wall. On the morning of the
7th at break of day the fire opened from all these volcanoes and the
first great siege conducted with the help of heavy artillery had begun.
The tactics of the Hungarian officer were first to batter over a large
area the ramparts of the gate of St. Romanus and then to shatter the
center with the fire of the great guns. The charge of the great cannon
of Urban was five hundred pounds of powder--the ball like a mass of
rock hurled from a crater on fire made the very ground tremble beneath
the walls. The entire facings of the towers and the bastions crumbled
into the moat.
Thus during ten days, while keeping his soldiers behind the eminences
of the ground only as necessary to work the batteries, did Mohammed
watch the breaches being made by the cannon of Urban in the walls,
towers and gates of Constantinople. But two hours and tons of oil were
scarce sufficient to cool the bronze gun, and only seven or eight shot
could be discharged a day: but each of these rent the walls like an
earthquake. On the tenth day the great gun burst with terrific force,
hurling the dismembered bodies of its inventor and the gunners far
over the walls into the doomed city.
Sapping and mining were now resorted to, and movable towers that
could be pushed against the walls were provided, having grappling
irons and drawbridges to let down upon the battlements, across which
the fierce Janizaries could rush in hand to hand encounter with the
defenders on or behind the ramparts.
The hope and heart of Constantine were cheered at last by the sight
of an approaching squadron of fourteen sail--among them five stout
and lofty ships guided by skillful pilots and manned by the veterans
of Italy and Greece long practiced in the arts and perils of the
sea. The Emperor however fearing to open the harbor of the Golden
Horn to the fleet of Mohammed, kept his own ships safely anchored
behind the chains that protected the harbor and left these ships to
fight out the battle alone.
The ramparts, the camp, the coasts of Asia and Europe were lined with
multitudes of spectators as these ships with joyful shouts sailed down
upon the hostile fleet of three hundred vessels. Most of these however
were huge boats crowded with troops but without artillery. Those who
have in their eye the situation of city, harbor and shore, can easily
conceive the scene and admire the grandeur of the spectacle.
On came the ships in proud defiance. Their artillery swept the
waters. Bullets, rocks and Greek fire were showered from these
floating fortresses upon the huge flat galleys of the Turks. The
weight of the Venetian vessels crushed them like seashells beneath
their planks. Wielding their helms and sails as skillfully as the
Turks did their horses, they spread death, disorder and flight among
the hostile fleet and strewed the two beaches of Asia and Europe with
their wrecks that burned as they drifted to the shore.
In vain Mohammed spurred his horse breast deep into the sea and drew
his scimitar against the Venetian vessels which were fighting but a
few yards from him in the mouth of the Bosphorus. For a moment his
cries and his presence encouraged his galleys but they were shattered
anew. The Greeks struck down the iron chains that protected the
harbor of the Golden Horn and the Christian ships entered it under
full sail amid the shouts of soldiers and populace thronging the
walls of the city.
Twelve thousand Turks perished in this sea fight. The introduction of
these supplies revived the hopes of the Greeks. The city could easily
be saved by the sea. A rational and moderate armament of the maritime
states might have saved the relics of the Roman name and maintained
a Christian fortress in the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Yet this
was the sole and feeble attempt to save Constantinople.
Mohammed, now convinced that a complete investment by sea and land
was the condition of conquest, resolved to conquer nature herself. By
means of the thousands of wood cutters and miners who followed his
army, he caused to be levelled and planked in a few weeks a road for
his galleys and ships over the hills and across the valleys into the
Golden Horn. Over these "ways" which were well greased with ox-fat,
a part of his fleet were drawn by cables and launched into the waters
and anchored in the same bay with the Greek fleet and under the
shelter of the Ottoman artillery. Then a hundred thousand men were
employed in making from one bank to the other a bridge or causeway
of sufficient breadth to permit one hundred men to march abreast to
storm the bastions of the fort.
Seven weeks of bombardment on the land side had at last opened
four immense breaches upon the ruins of four towers. Only the moat
of great width and thirty feet deep protected the assault of four
hundred thousand men from the ten thousand combatants of Constantine
that were extended along the walls for more than three miles.
The Sultan was desirous of sparing the blood of his soldiers, now that
the city lay at his mercy, of securing the Byzantine treasures as well
and accordingly sent an envoy to appeal from the courage of the Emperor
to the cowardice of the Greeks. The avarice of the Sultan might have
been satisfied with the annual tribute of one hundred thousand ducats;
but his ambition grasped the capital of the East. He guaranteed the
Empire the absolute and independent sovereignty of the Peloponnesus,
the property of all the inhabitants of Constantinople subject only
to tribute if he would surrender.
The reply was grandly heroic and stoical, not to say Christian. It
was sad, hopeless, yet grand and dignified. He said that he would
give thanks to God if Mohammed really inclined, in according him a
sure and honorable peace, to spare his nation the catastrophes that
weighed upon it. * * * That he was ready to discuss with the Sultan the
conditions of a treaty as from prince to prince or even the conditions
of a tribute of war imposed by the strong upon the weak:--but that no
human force and no personal advantage would ever make him consent to
give up to the enemy of the Christian name an empire and a capital,
which he had sworn to his God, to his people and to himself, not to
deliver, but with his life.
These words, too noble, too elevated for the rest of Christian
Europe were most irritating to the impatient Sultan who, guided by
his favorite science of astrology, fixed on the twenty-ninth day of
May as the fortunate and fatal hour.
Several days were given to preparations for the assault. The Sultan
proclaimed it throughout the camps, and dervishes, fired their
religious fanaticism by going through the ranks and haranguing the
Moslems: "It was the last step of Islam in Europe to sweep off the
last focus of idolatry on the two continents. Their bows and their
scimitars were the weapons of Allah the true God. Those who vanquish
in his name will possess the earth; those who fall will possess the
houris and the fountains of Paradise."
On the eve of the day of the assault an illumination of joy suddenly
lighted up the camps of the Ottomans from the hills of the Bosphorus of
Europe to the sea of Marmora. Every soldier had his torch of resinous
pine, and thousands of fires burned all night long, and the three
contiguous seas were reddened with an anticipated reflection of the
conflagration of the doomed city.
Constantinople lighted up as it were by its own funeral pyre watched
and wept and prayed during the night. Endless processions of priests,
monks, nuns, and other women thronged the streets chanting with
mournful voice, "Kyrie Eleison. Lord, have mercy. Lord, rise in our
defence." The whole city ran to the altars; no one except Constantine
and his few soldiers ran to arms: and he was everywhere posting his
generals and giving orders for the morrow.
The morning dawned with the four hundred thousand men in order of
battle. The disciplined and veteran troops were carefully arranged in
several lines of battle, Mohammed himself at the center and in their
front with his twenty thousand Janizaries waiting for the decisive
moment to arrive.
Between the city and the camp were the two hundred thousand motley
volunteers whom he would send first into the battle to tire the
defenders and fill the trenches with their dead bodies.
Constantine went with the nobles of his court to the Church of
St. Sophia seeking to draw from the religion of his fathers the
courage and perhaps the fortune of saving its altars.
He attended a short service, as if it were his own funeral service. He
received communion from the hands of the Patriarch; made with tears
a public confession of his sins to which the sobbings of the people
were the only audible response. After this he repaired to his palace,
his household and his family, where says one of his auditors in his
farewell, he pronounced the funeral oration of the Greek Empire. He
then threw aside the robes of royalty, keeping on only his shoes
embroidered with a golden eagle, and his purple mantle, mounted on
horseback in the costume of a private soldier, and went forth for the
last time to battle in the front ranks of the defenders of the faith.
Such men only four hundred years ago did Western Christian Europe
willingly let die when she failed to stand beside him to beat back
the Turkish hordes and warriors to their desert plains in Asia.
Mohammed II. then proclaimed to his army as if to excite every fiercest
passion in the breast of his men, that the entire city was devoted to
spoil, and the inhabitants to slavery or death. "The city and public
buildings are mine; but I abandon to you the captives and the booty,
the precious metals and beautiful women; be rich and happy. The
provinces of my Empire are numerous, the intrepid soldier who first
mounts the walls of Constantinople shall be governor of the most
delightful and opulent of them all, and such will be my gratitude
that he will obtain more wealth and honor than he can dream of."
Mohammed thus fired all the cruel passions of the undisciplined hosts
of his vanguard.
Neither pen nor tongue can fly fast enough to describe the wild
impetuosity of their attack as they precipitated themselves upon the
reverse side of the moat, one hundred feet wide and six thousand paces
long. The stone, the earth, the wood these carried were not sufficient
to fill this mighty trench. The cannon and the sharpshooters behind
the ramparts still existing, strewed thousands of Turks on the back
of the exterior ditch. The smoke of the Greek artillery rolled back
upon the combatants, so that the gunners and archers of Constantine
could take aim only by the noise against the hosts of their invisible
assailants. In vain the bullets and the grape shot filled the trenches
with the Turks: these masses of men, pushed forward by their mere
impetus, rushed headlong into the water and formed with the dead and
dying a causeway of human bodies about the gateway of St. Romanus,
which supplied a bridge for the battalions that pressed behind.
After this sacrifice of the "Scum of the Army," thus put to death to
secure victory, the three columns of the regular army, comprising two
hundred and sixty thousand men, advanced in profound silence to the
assault. The force of the fire of the nine thousand brave defenders
was already exhausted by this desperate struggle of two hours. To
protect them was this ditch now nearly filled up with earth and
men and crumbling walls. The purple mantle of Constantine, as he
appeared momentarily on the summits of the shattered walls, served
as a target for the Tartars, and an inspiration to the Spartans and
Italians inside. Strong yet in their broken walls, in their towers
and in their artillery, in their despair they repulsed the mad rushes
of these torrents of men as with wild cries, under cover of clouds
of arrows and with glistening scimitars they charged again and again
along the whole line on port and continent. For three terrible hours
the carnage continued, and fifty thousand Ottomans rolled into the
ditches or into the sea. The huge balls of Constantine tearing into
these solid columns piled the ground with dead; stones, rocks, beams
and Greek fire, crushed, burned, and mutilated those who tried to
scale those wrecks of towers.
The three column heads halted, wavered and ebbed a moment towards the
camp of Mohammed. A shout of victory rose from behind the ramparts,
and a chanting of hymns from the heart of the city. Constantine
hurried from gate to gate to encourage the hope of his soldiers,
who were done nearly to death.
But their joy was vanishing. Mohammed wavered only a moment, then
stirred by the cries of his Janizaries, who still stood motionless
about his tent, yet burning with fury to avenge the rebuff of the
army, he turned and launched them like a mighty thunderbolt to the
deserted center of attack--the gate of St. Romanus.
The presence of the Sultan brandishing his battle-mace, the shame of
forsaking their sovereign, the reproaches of the Janizaries rallied
the shaken columns and the battle was on as fierce as ever. Mohammed
promised a kingdom to the first man who should take and hold a rampart.
At this juncture his heroic Justiniani fled his standard, though the
Emperor pleaded with him by the panic that would follow his flight;
but there may be bounds to human courage when men fight for glory,
and not for country or for faith, and he fled. It proved the rout of
the besieged.
The Italians followed their general. The Janizaries, at fearful loss,
swarmed over the walls. Constantine, flinging off his purple mantle
and retaining but the arms and the uniform of a common soldier, that
it might not be mutilated, fought to the last breath between the
inner and the outer wall at the breach of the gate of St. Romanus,
that the Turks might enter the imperial city only upon the dead body
of its fallen Emperor. Thus did Constantine by his heroic death put
to eternal contrast and eternal shame the dastardly degeneracy of
his own nation and the miserable cowardice and selfishness of the
Christian nations of western Europe.
The story is soon finished. As the troops rushed through and over the
deserted walls, a hundred thousand panic stricken men and women fled
to the church of St. Sophia. The sight of this unarmed and helpless
multitude disarmed the fury of the soldiers, who, remembering the
promises of the Sultan, began each to seize his captives and his. The
Greeks held out their hands to be tied with cords or saddle girths;
women and girls were tied by their girdles or their veils. Nuns
were torn from the altars and from their convents with naked bosoms,
outstretched hands and dishevelled hair. The cries of mothers, children
and nuns were heartrending: even the Ottomans themselves were affected
by it. Yet sixty thousand captives thus bound came forth from convent,
hovel, or from palace, traversed for the last time the streets of
their desolated city to be carried into captivity into all the cities
and the tents of Asia.
The pillage lasted eight hours without exhausting the riches of
an empire. The coined treasure was more than four million ducats,
the uncoined gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, vases and ornaments of
palaces and churches was incalculable. One hundred and twenty thousand
manuscripts warmed the baths of the barbarians. But at the close of the
day Mohammed entered at the head of his Janizaries to restore order. He
proceeded at once to the Church of St. Sophia. The soldiers were still
engaged in pillaging its treasures: and one of the barbarians even
in his presence continued the work of destroying a precious marble
of the sanctuary. Mohammed struck him a blow with his club saying:
"I have abandoned you the slaves and the treasures, but the monuments
belong to me." The soldier was borne off dying from the church.
Accustomed to Arabian and barbarian magnificence--Constantinople
dazzled him as she sat in her grandeur the Queen of two continents
on the shores of the Bosphorus:--
"Earth hath no fairer sight to show
Than this blue strait, whose waters flow,
Bordered with vineyards, summer bowers,
White palaces and ivied towers."
Mohammed after having admired the grandeur of the edifice, the
elevation of the dome--a second temple upheld in air by one hundred
columns of porphyry, of rose-colored marble or serpentine, mounted
the altar and offered a Mussulman prayer: then ordered that this
church, the most magnificent and majestic which Christianity had
yet constructed should become the first Mosque of the Conquerors of
Constantinople. The cross was torn down, the pictures of the saints
destroyed, and Muezzins mounting to the dome chanted for the first
time to the desert streets of the Metropolis of Christianity in the
East, the well-known call: "God is God; God is great; Come to prayer."
As the architects in his presence began to remove the mosaics of
colored glass which formed the pictures in the ceiling we are told
that Mohammed cried out: "Stop, confine yourselves to covering over
these mosaics with a coat of lime so that they may not scandalize
the believers but do not tear from the ceilings these marvelous
incrustations. Who knows but that they may be uncovered at some future
day in another change of fortune and of destination of this temple."
That hour of Destiny has not yet struck the hour of deliverance,
and the lime still covers the walls and the Muezzins still call the
faithful to prayer above the noise and din of the busy streets of a
fallen city once the glory of a Christian Empire.
From St. Sophia Mohammed proceeded to the august but desolate palace
of a hundred successors of the great Constantine but which in a few
hours had been stripped of its pomp of royalty. A passing reflection
on the vanity and vicissitudes of human greatness caused him to repeat
an elegant distich of Persian poetry:--
"The spider has woven his net in the imperial palace; and the owl
hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab."
The fifth day after the conquest he consecrated by a formal act the
liberty of conscience accorded by the Koran to the vanquished. He
claimed for the Mussulmans only half the churches leaving the rest
to the Christians. The patriarch Gennadius led in pomp to the palace
clothed in his pontifical robes and in the midst of a cortége of
priests, received from him the investiture of the patriarchate. "It is
my wish," said the Sultan, "to give the Christians and their pontiffs
the same rights and the same protection that they enjoyed under your
emperors." He even attended in person the pomps and ceremonies of
the Christians, as an impartial of the two religions which henceforth
were to divide his people.
Before the death of Mohammed in 1459, by his many conquests of the
neighboring states and peoples he had consolidated his empire: and it
stood forth a fearless conqueror until in 1571 the battle of Lepanto
marked the turning point in the history of the Ottoman power.
We here turn aside for a brief hour from the stream of historical
narrative to consider some of the results of Ottoman misrule which
has for more than four centuries controlled an empire in Eastern
Europe almost as large as France, in one of the most delightful and
beautifully varied regions on the continent and which yet holds its
peoples in the relentless grip of the Dark Ages.
Weighed in the balances of the humanity, the culture, the Christianity
and the civilization of the dawning century, Turkey is in every way
found wanting and soon may appear the hand of fire to write on the
black pages of her awful atrocities, "Thy days are numbered. Thy
kingdom shall be destroyed and given to another." How long shall the
blood of her slain cry aloud in the ears of Christendom, yet in vain
still cry aloud? The consciences of England and America must give
answer to that cry of blood or be themselves weighed in the balances
in the day of the Lord at hand.